Book ID: CBB001551956

The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (2015)

unapi

Ingham, Patricia Clare (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2015
Physical Details: 250 + 27 pp.; bibl.; index; ill.
Language: English

"The Medieval New is precise in its methods, pioneering in its claims, and creative in bringing together ethical, literary, theological, and historical concerns. Patricia Clare Ingham presents a sensitive and nuanced view of the relationship between 'old' and 'new' that adds immeasurably to the conversation about innovation and its relation to tradition."---Richard Newhauser, Arizona State University Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship.

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Reviewed By

Review Steven A. Walton (October 2018) Review of "The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation". Technology and Culture (pp. 965-966). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001551956/

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Authors & Contributors
Cittadella, Alex
Johnson, Sean F.
Thomas Freudenhammer
Guroff, Margaret
Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum
Califano, Salvatore
Concepts
Diffusion of innovation; diffusion of knowledge; diffusion of technology
Technological innovation
Social change
Arab/Islamic world, civilization and culture
Technology and society
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Time Periods
Medieval
Renaissance
Ancient
20th century
Early modern
19th century
Places
Europe
United States
China
Italy
Central America
South America
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